Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The plan may be flawless, the booty
priceless and the robbery perfectly executed. Yet art thieves
seldom consider how they will get rich from their stolen
masterpieces, art-crime experts said.

Seven paintings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Claude
Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Lucian Freud were stolen
from the Kunsthal museum in the Dutch city of Rotterdam this
week. The combined value may be as much as $130 million, yet as
long as they are stolen goods, the paintings are effectively
valueless, said Olivia Tait, manager of European clients at the
Art Loss Register, an online database of lost art.

“On the face of it, art theft seems like an easy way to
get money -- after all, you can’t get $5 million by robbing a
bank,” Tait said by telephone from London. “Criminals don’t
think about the fact that they can’t resell artworks after. Then
they realize that they can’t take the paintings across borders
because they are listed in all the police databases.”

The Rotterdam burglary ranks among the most spectacular art
heists of the last decades. Comparable incidents are the 2010
theft of five paintings -- also including works by Picasso and
Matisse -- from the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the 1990
burglary from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of
art worth an estimated $500 million.

Hidden, Abandoned

In neither case has the lost art been retrieved. Once
thieves wake up to the difficulty of converting stolen
masterpieces into hard cash, they often hide or abandon the
paintings, which may not resurface for decades -- if ever.

“Forty percent of stolen artworks return within seven
years,” said Ton Cremers, who was head of security at
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for 14 years and has since advised more
than 450 museums on security as an independent consultant. “If
they don’t return in 10 years, the chances are very small that
they will be recovered.”

Sometimes paintings are even destroyed or damaged by the
criminals who took them, said Lynda Albertson, chief executive
of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art. The
thief who stole Picasso’s “Pigeon With Green Peas” from the
Musee d’Art Moderne in 2010 “threw it in a trash container
shortly after the theft and the container was emptied before it
could be retrieved,” Albertson said.

Even with the difficulty of selling famous stolen
masterpieces, Picasso’s works are the victims of theft more
often than any other artist’s, according to the Art Loss
Register, which lists more than 1,000 missing Picassos.

Pinching Picassos

“Everyone knows who he is, even people with only a couple
of years of high-school education,” Cremers said. “These are
not specialists in art. It is only in the movies that you get
specialist thieves. In real life, it is just ordinary criminals
who also steal cars and sell drugs.”

Occasionally “works get traded on the black market,
bartered for weapons for example,” Tait said. “But in our 20-year history, we’ve never come across the Hollywood scenario
where a passionate art collector commissions thieves to steal
specific works of art.”

Dutch Collection

They belong to a private collection called the Triton
Foundation, started by the Rotterdam port entrepreneur Willem
Cordia, who died last year at the age of 70. The collection
consists of about 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures from
the period 1860 to 1970.

About 150 works were on show in an exhibition called
“Avant-Gardes.” The Kunsthal has no permanent collection and
is reliant on loans to put on shows.

“What happened is every museum director’s nightmare,”
Emily Ansenk, the director of the Kunsthal, said in a statement
on the website. “This incident came like a bombshell to the
entire art world.”

Police said the theft took place at about 3 a.m. local time
on Oct. 16 and they are now scrutinizing video footage and
talking to possible witnesses. Twenty detectives are
investigating the theft, Roland Ekkers, a spokesman for the
Rotterdam-Rijnmond police, said by telephone today.

Ekkers said the police received about 20 tips, of which
four merit further investigation.

Tire Tracks

Officers arrived at the Kunsthal just five minutes after
the alarm was raised. Local press reported that there were tire
tracks on the museum’s lawn after the burglary.

Ansenk described the building’s security as “state-of-the-art,” and in accordance with insurer’s requirements. The police
said the thieves entered through a door at the back of the
building and that there was no sign of a break-in when officers
arrived on the scene.

“Having staff at night doesn’t necessarily eliminate the
risk,” she said in e-mailed answers to questions. In the Paris
heist, “the three night guards at that museum all reported that
they saw nothing.”

Koolhaas Box

Cremers raised doubts about the suitability of the Kunsthal
for art of the caliber of the current show. The building,
designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, “is like a box,
and there are no barriers for thieves,” he said.

“They should have arranged special security before the
exhibition,” Cremers said. “They should have built a special
vault inside. They will have problems with future loans.”

Cremers said it’s possible the thieves will attempt to
demand a ransom from the Triton Foundation for the paintings.
Albertson at ARCA cited the recent example of bond fund manager
Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive officer of DoubleLine
Capital LP, who last month recovered $10 million in art stolen
from his home in Santa Monica, California. That was after he
offered $1.7 million in rewards.

“The thief or thieves in this Dutch case could see the
heirs to the Triton Foundation as a lucrative target,”
Albertson said.

Tait said such demands are rarely met.

“Insurance companies discourage it,” she said. “And if
you pay some kind of ransom, you identify yourself as someone
who is prepared to go along with such demands and open yourself
to future attempts.”

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